These are...complicated. Born of a desire to connect more deeply with both the performer and the audience, I am attempting to make a shared space for communication. Instead of asking the performer to carefully attend a private document of notation, these scores are for the audience as much as the performer. Built initially from vellum, ink, watercolor, and found objects, they are only fully realized when they are animated temporally, through fixed audio and video. The desire is for something immersive, an evolving audio-visual environment in which sound, expression, and interpretation co-exist. I used to begin my fully notated works using sketchbooks, drawings of sounds, and narrative theory - and it felt sincere. Now these works take that approach (and the vulnerability inherent in it) to create a shared narrative environment in which the exchange of sound/music/noise (hopefully) exists more equitably. 

her body's shores

Commissioned by the Center for New Music in San Francisco, her body's shores was created as in both installation and performance forms. The installation lived at C4NM for July and August 2022, and Adam Fong and Brent Miller gave the workshop premiere of the performance work. Here are some photos (including a few of the mess I made during the installation process...)
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Chimera's Garden

Chimera’s Garden is from a series of works I call ‘narrative environment scores,’ and it was created collaboratively with the talented Shanna Pranaitis, who recorded this version for the Music of SEAMUS Vol. 23 album (May 26, 2023 release).  Narrative environment scores are born of a desire to establish a shared aural-visual world for the listener and performer that evolves temporally. The original physical score combined watercolor, ink, and found objects to convey the connections between the protagonist and the natural world. That document was then translated to video and fixed media, to act as both the object that the performer reads/responds to, and the context in which the audience experiences the performance. The protagonist of the piece is never at home with others, always at odds with her surroundings, until she loses herself in the cultivation of her garden. She is eventually both fulfilled and subsumed by her remote sanctuary, as her body transforms through obsession. Many thanks to Shanna for her patience and insights in bringing this piece to life.

SEAMUS 32 is available on band camp and New Focus Recordings

Chimera's Garden - Text
by Lisa Renée Coons

She was forged of aberrant pieces

​a patchwork of violence and noise
The seams yawned fragile at night
raw, as she prowled and worried and keened 
 
A carver came to smooth the flaws
sculpting them in metal and glass
She grew brittle and still:
a mirror without breath
But when she arched to view her illusions
her joints shattered at every bow
 
A tailor tried to dress the wounds, to veil a fractured plain
but her threads unraveled, more frail when touched,
Spiraling out on currents:
contrails and clouds lacing her wake
 
Her filament rooted in bedrock,
stone seeped up through her rifts
She rounded and slowed: a monument overgrown
weeping dew into the soil
Silver forests erupted, gnarled and broad
            obsidian blooms filled clefts and boughs
And silk orchids burst from the carpet moss
            cyclones of light held in translucent seeds 
 
Young vines cleaved the ancient husk
and she emerged on mantis legs,
Glass wings clasping over jeweled green scales
she pried the tempests from their shells
And cradling the small storms to her breast
sung softly, tending her lucent garden